229 family offices have registered in Singapore since 2020 – here’s the list

Singapore wants to become Asia’s top centre for family offices – at the pace the city-state is going it might just become the world’s centre for the sector. 

Because since the beginning of last year, 229 businesses have registered as family offices in Singapore. The list is below. They have all registered under the government’s Standard Industrial Classification (SSIC) code 66306, which specifies being a Single/Multiple family offices activities (e.g. managing investments and trusts for a single or multiple families) 

There are a number of points about the list: 

Firstly, not all of these businesses are family offices, or at least managing the assets of individuals and families with at least $100 million in assets. Many of them aren’t even trying to be multi-family offices. It’s very easy and cheap to register a business in Singapore and the authorities aren’t going to check the legitimacy of all these groups that have registered as family offices in terms of managing a proscribed amount of assets. 

Secondly, it’s interesting to see a large number of mainland China sounding names on the list. Whether there is an exodus of money from mainland China setting up family offices in Singapore can’t be confirmed from this, but the list suggests something might be going on. That hunch is given greater credibility with the acceleration of this trend since 2020, as China really started to ratchet up its rhetoric against the West. 

But even if two-thirds of the list aren’t single-family offices managing upwards from $100 million of an individual’s or family’s money, that still leaves a lot of family offices that are legitimate.

Groups registering as family offices in Singapore since 2020

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